PayPal’s goal of translating its online success to mobile markets makes another leap forward as it announces its acquisition of the Wellesley, MA payments startup Paydiant. While it isn’t necessarily a household name, Paydiant has supported white-labeled, mobile wallet solutions and loyalty programs for companies like Subway, Harris Teeter, and Capital One since it’s inception in 2010. Even more notable than its individual merchant clients is the Merchant Customer Exchange (MCX), the merchant network behind the development of CurrentC.

Recent strives by technology and payments companies like Apple, Google, Samsung, and PayPal sparked the creation of MCXs CurrentC. With this merchant operated mobile wallet, companies like CVS, Walmart, and Target hope to maintain a competitive landscape in payments services so as to ensure the stability of their own organizations while providing additional means for their clients to pay for goods both smarter and faster.

On Monday during his keynote at the Mobile World Conference in Barcelona, Google’s senior vice president of Android, Sundar Pichai, announced a new mobile payments platform called Android Pay. Unlike it’s predecessor Google Wallet, Android Pay aims to succeed by making the core of mobile payments available to developers as an API rather than a native app. By making the service available for third party usage, Google is soliciting creative thinkers and engineers to find viable use cases for mobile payments without making any of their own assumptions.

By itself, Android Pay equates to one half of the service provided by Apple Pay. While it allows for external developers to enable payments, it isn’t a standalone app for managing credit card details. However, by pairing with the existing application Google Wallet, Google appears to have a suite of applications that provide a comparable foe to it’s Apple counterpart.

Here’s the thing about startups: You have a great idea, you employ some smart people, slap up a website, and the next thing you know, you are running a business with 20 employees in 29 markets.

There’s never enough time or resources to do all of the things you should do to help grow your business because you’re too busy actually making the idea work. With so much going on, it’s easy to let measuring metrics fall to the wayside. It’s a ton of work and your whole team has to be on board, but neglecting this can also result in one of your biggest missed opportunities.

One of the best things about being a lean, mean startup is that you can make a game-changing decision without going through the bureaucracy and red tape that impedes the behemoths. But what information are you using to make those decisions?

So you’re building a digital product! Be it a financial SaaS platform, a blog, or a twitter account, there’s one simple lesson that can help guide you during any part of the process and help attract and retain users, and help create a corporate culture that energizes and excites developers.

Here it is: Open a dialogue with potential customers. No matter what stage your business or product is in, it is always vital to talk to the folks who will be (or currently are) using the product. You can do this via Twitter, an e-mail form on your site, LinkedIn, Facebook, forums, Reddit, Twitch, or even in-person. You don’t have to do them all at once, or respond to every message. But reaching out and asking can bring in ideas, solutions, and re-shape your thinking.

An example I’ll use is a personal one. I founded Shado Sports Ventures back in July with the intent of creating a fantasy sports platform that integrated finances. I posted on the /r/fantasybaseball (among others) Reddit asking for some feedback and to see if there was interest. Early on, we had a basic website that had a form asking users to “Convince Us” that they’d be great for our beta test. What we got on Day 3 changed our entire approach:

In the Boston startup scene, finding a CTO or technical cofounder can be difficult and time consuming. The coders that are willing to take the risk and join a new venture often hear more pitches than they know what to do with, and ideas that are unproven or difficult to demonstrate without a prototype can be harder to sell. If you’re running into the Catch-22 of needing to have a technical team member in order to build a business to attract a technical team member, consulting groups can help you fill in the talent gap. Here are some ways to use a consulting group to help attract full-time talent.

If you’re just beginning to dive into the world of software, chances are you’ve never heard of Version Control. However, you’ll quickly find that it’s an absolute necessity when building applications. Whether you’re an engineer, product owner, or marketer, it’s an essential aspect of maintaining projects.

There are lots of software contracting groups out there. Finding the right one to build a website for your small business is a high-stakes decision. One of the questions that we get consistently from non-technical entrepreneurs and small business owners is how to know which group to hire. Here’s a quick guide to finding the right fit for business owners who don’t have a technical background.

Keeping user data secure is one of the biggest challenges in running a large website. Over the years, standards have been created and best practices have been put in place to help with that security. But sometimes, even when you follow all the guidelines and do your best to make sure your website and servers are secure, something unexpected happens. On April 7th, 2014 a major exploit was found in the most used SSL/TLS library in the world. This means that over 66% of websites – including banks, social media, and maybe even your website – were put at risk.

Arcus Solutions is proud to announce the release of our first open-source project, ArcBUS. This MBTA bus prediction application was developed to give back to the community in the Greater Boston area as well as to showcase some of the software design practices we use in our work. In an effort to make the application accessible to all T goers, we have decided to release the application to the public absolutely free!

For those of you interested in the software practices involved, you can find the entirety of the codebase available on our GitHub page. We have worked to make the repository as lean and readable as possible, but we also plan on writing a series of articles focused on the different processes that went into the application’s development. Though the application doesn’t currently support areas outside of Boston, we welcome any outside contributions to this open-source project that may help broaden its horizons.